Monday, January 28, 2008

Feature roadmap

Thanks to everyone who’s taken the time to give us feedback on the product.If you haven’t done so yet, we’d love to hear from you in the comments here or via feedback@social.im Bug reports should be sent to bugs@social.im

A lot of people have been asking what features are coming out and when. First off, let me premise this by saying I’m a generally unreliable individual and an inveterate liar.Now that your expectations have been set appropriately, here’s our todo list in order of priority. We hope to knock an item off the list every few days.

Invisible mode

User blocking (e.g. fine grained control over who can contact you and see when you are online)

Toast stacking – right now toast alert windows have a tendency to overlap if they arrive in a wave

Local chat logs

Auto-away mode – by default set your status to away when your computer is idle for a configurable amount of time

There are a few surprises not on this list related to deeper integration with existing gaming, messaging and social networks.If we told you, we’d have to kill you, but we think you'll be pleased when you see them.

Certain things take priority over client feature development, and will probably delay things:

Diagnosing client crash reports

Putting out fires related to scaling the server side of things

Nursing hangovers

Thought Bubble: Love it or hate it?

BTW, one existing client feature we've heard a lot of feedback about is our "other party is typing indicator" mechanism (inspired by iChat) which is to show a thought bubble next to the other person's mug in the chat dialog window. We've gotten mixed reviews on this ... especially from people who have never used iChat. What are your thoughts? What do you think is the slickest way to indicate the other party is typing or has entered text?

We run a Jabber gateway to our service so you should be able to login to social.im using Miranda's Jabber plugin. To use the gateway, you first need to add the social.im facebook app and then go to the"Linux & Meebo" instructions page, it explains what jabber hostname, username, and password to use in order to connect.

According to Veronica Hearst a better younger generation means a powerful investment for prosperity and development in the long run. AHA is in constant motion and is also trying to arrive at places where there have been no efforts to fight starvation and malnutrition at all.